


I'm Not There

by Star_Tsar



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Anxiety, Bonding, Family, Gen, Growing Up, Huey's intelligence may be slightly exaggerated from what's canon, Light Angst, Slice of Life, minor references to religion, the barest hint of Huey/Lena as a narrative device
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25416805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Tsar/pseuds/Star_Tsar
Summary: Gyro asks Huey to attend the funeral of an old science professor and colleague, which he then chooses over a Junior Woodchucks event on the same evening. As the day progresses, Huey starts to think about the future and his place in society, and in his family, as a child prodigy. He meets his cousin, Corvus von Drake, and other characters along the way.
Relationships: Huey Duck & Gyro Gearloose
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	I'm Not There

Huey looked at his phone. Nothing. And after Violet promised she’d take pictures of the new Junior Woodchucks’ initiation for him. Maybe it just hadn’t started.

 _It is only five, I guess,_ Huey thought. It just felt later. The dim sunlight falling through old trees slowly drifting by on the car ride, the very long car ride out to the country, out to the Tzedek Tirdof Synagogue, where Dr. Rüppell’s funeral service would soon be held -- that’s why it felt so late.

Huey loosened his necktie. Then he checked his phone, again. Still nothing.

“Dr. Gearloose?” Huey looked at his chaperone and chauffeur. “Is Fenton going to meet us there?”

“Who?” Gyro asked, not taking his bespectacled eyes from the road.

“Dr. Crackshell-Cabrera,” Huey answered.

“ _Who?_ ” Gyro again feigned ignorance, exaggerating a confused glance at the duckling.

“... The intern?” Huey closed his eyes, rather than roll them.

“Oh! Him. No,” he tersely explained. “He didn’t know Dr. Rüppell.”

“Neither did I,” replied Huey, wondering if that bore an air of ingratitude he didn’t intend.

“No, but… you’re special,” Gyro had warmed up (or, at least, thawed out) to the boy after learning not only of his natural genius, but also his relation to the chicken’s favorite professor.

They let the moment sit for a while.

“Stop playing with your tie. I’m not tying it again for you,” the older male chastised, seemingly having realized his earlier sentimentality.

“Yes, Dr. Gearloose,” the duckling muttered, before futilely checking his phone for the umpteenth time.

They carried on quietly after that.

There was a furtive anxiety surrounding this, the attendance of Huey’s first non-decoy funeral. He had done all the research he could on the evening’s probable procession, but that could only allay so many worries. Someone also had an ulterior motive in inviting him to be there, which hadn’t occurred to him until after he agreed to go. So there was that to worry about, too. He wished that Fenton could have been there to help, at least.

“Your cousin, Corvus, is going to be there, remember?” Gyro might have been trying to reassure the duckling.

“Yeah. I’ve never met him before,” Huey wanted to be positive, but it rang false in his voice. Corvus was the one who asked for him to attend the funeral. He had an idea why.

“He always asks about you. He can’t wait to get you in the Physics Department at CIT,” maybe Gyro wasn’t trying to help Huey feel better, after all. “So you also have nepotism going for you.”

“Yeah, he said that to Uncle Scrooge, too,” Huey felt the first butterfly rise in his stomach. “Could we listen to the radio, please?”

“On our way to a funeral? And what happens when the bereaved hear us pull up blasting the Top 40? Don’t be tacky,” chided Gyro with a flicking wrist.

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“Yeah, well.”

The ride continued in silence, and Huey fought the recurrent urge to look at his phone. Dr. Gearloose might have gotten in a mood if he did so.

Huey didn’t regret choosing to attend the funeral over the JW ceremony. He couldn’t regret it. Dr. Rüppell was a beautiful mind, and he contributed a great deal to the world through science -- especially in the field of quantum computing, where he all but codified a methodology of computing efficiently versus decoherence and other noise. Huey had never met Rüppell, of course, but he was familiar with his work. The lab’s quantum computer was largely Huey’s responsibility, after all.

But that probably wasn’t normal. Not for a twelve-year-old, anyway. But that should have been a point of pride, surely?

Maybe not. Maybe it was just weird.

Maybe when Dewey and Louie pretended to be unimpressed with their big brother’s achievements, they weren’t pretending.

No, this was no way to think. Huey didn’t need to let himself get dragged down.

Of course Dewey and Louie wouldn’t care about Huey’s genius; to them, he would always be just their brother. Besides, Webby and Violet were always very impressed with Huey’s gifts -- along with the adults, but their approval meant less than his peers’ in this arena, for reasons he couldn’t quite ascertain.

Lena was really the only one who teased Huey for his precocious pursuits in science, hinting that his attempts to over explain his work were expressions of self-absorption and vainglory, and maybe they were, but she would tease him no matter what he said or did.

Huey did get a kind of satisfaction from it, though, as strange as it may sound. It was reassuring, in a way, to know she would be there, keeping his ego in check. Huey was, of course, lucid enough to realize he had an occasionally inflated ego.

Lena had taken a real interest in him after she moved in with Violet. It started with the clownery at the Senior Junior Woodchuck challenge, and had escalated since. It wasn’t bullying; in the end it wasn’t even mean, really, but she did go a little far with it sometimes.

Violet had said, maybe -- no, probably as a joke, that it was Lena’s way of flirting with him. But that was ridiculous, and Lena herself probably put Violet up to say it, as some cruel prank.

(But what if...?)

Best to put the lid on those thoughts early.

A text! Perfect to occupy his mind. Huey unlocked his phone and… it was only from Mom.

 _“Ya there yet?”_ she asked.

 _“Nope,”_ he answered.

_“Is Gyro being nice to you?”_

_“Yep.”_

It was a minute or two before she responded. Huey supposed he had been a little monosyllabic in his replies. Maybe it was cause for concern, to her.

 _“You okay sweetie?”_ Mom knew he wasn’t. In so many unpunctuated words, this was confirmed.

 _“I’m fine,”_ Huey started to type, before rethinking the terseness of the deflection. _“Just getting ready to meet everyone. Thanks for asking, though.”_

Another minute passed, with no response. Did he say something wrong? Let something slip?

 _“OK love you,”_ along with the moai head emoji, for whatever reason, was her answer. She had been thrown off the scent.

 _“I love you too, Mom,”_ Huey slid the phone into his jacket’s inside pocket just as he felt the car careen into a parking space.

Huey guessed they were there, after all. He looked up to see the stony carapace housing the temple a few yards away. A gaggle of aging academics were huddled near the entrance, some smoking tobacco as they spoke to one another, presumably waiting for the wake to begin.

Gyro had already hopped out and started circling to the other side of the car before it was noticed. Huey had time to undo his seatbelt and double-check his belongings before the chicken opened the passenger door and beckoned the boy out for his inspection. Huey’s feet hit the concrete and Gyro’s eyes scanned him up and down. It didn’t take long for something to be found amiss.

“Gah! Look at your tie,” Gyro knelt down and unfastened the loose knot with fingers like lightning. “I told you not to mess with it, didn’t I?”

“Sorry, Gyro,” Huey tensed up, standing at attention and wincing only minimally upon realizing he neglected to address Dr. Gearloose as such.

Gyro took a deep breath and, retying the necktie just as dexterously as he untied it, sighed, “It’s alright.”

Huey looked back over at the people congregated in front of the synagogue, trying to spot Corvus. Sure enough, his nearly sixty-year-old cousin was puffing on a Davidoff Gold, holding the cigarette in one hand and his eyeglasses in the other as some portly goose in tweed (at a funeral) jawed at him.

This analysis was cut short as Gyro tightened the knot around Huey’s neck, nearly choking him.

“Come on, Hubert,” Gyro stood and fixed the drape of his own jacket, then put a hand on Huey’s shoulder and led him up to the doors of the temple.

Huey tried to quell the beating wings of the butterflies in his stomach as the glassy gazes of the Calisota Institute of Technology’s great professors, Rüppell’s former coworkers, fell on him. They were all balding. Huey ran his fingers through the feathers on his head, instinctively.

“Von Drake!” one of the old men called, and the duck in question had his attention quickly jump from the caller to the approaching duckling.

“There’s my little cousin!” Corvus exclaimed in a distinctly American accent. He put his glasses on and switched his cigarette to the other hand before stepping up and leaning down, to greet Huey on his own level.

“Hi, Corvus!” Huey thought that sounded genuine enough. He was excited to meet his cousin, of course, but his nerves were weighing against his ability to express it.

“Everyone,” Corvus snapped his head to the group, addressing them, “This is Hubert Duck-”

“We know, you’ve told us,” a skinny, not-as-old albatross interrupted, to the soft chortling of the rest.

Huey saw Gyro slip passed the fellows closest to the door and into the synagogue, leaving him behind. Even if it weren’t impolite to follow, Corvus’s hands had slithered around the boys shoulders and rooted him in place.

“Alright, Dr. Mollymawk, perhaps you’d like to volunteer to man the calculator for the tricks he’s about to perform for us?” Corvus asked the albatross as he stepped behind Huey, eager to see the mental powers Scrooge had no-doubt related to him.

“Oh, no,” Huey hated doing this. Maybe Uncle Ludwig liked showing off this way, but it made his nephew feel like a freak. “Really, I wouldn’t want to do anything inappr-”

“False modesty is worse than arrogance, Huey,” Corvus gently squeezed his shoulders, but it didn’t make him feel any better. “Are you ready, Mollymawk?”

“As I’ll ever be, von Drake,” Mollymawk was holding a phone in his hand, probably with a calculator open.

“Good! If we could get a couple… oh, I don’t know... seven digit numbers, please?” Corvus asked the crowd, which had huddled around Mollymawk, opposite Huey and his cousin.

“5,938,821,” suggested one onlooker. “9,138,272,” called another. Mollymawk deftly punched them into his phone.

“Add them,” said Corvus.

“15,077,093,” Huey answered just as quickly as any computer, and felt his heart sink upon appreciating the spectacle he had become in doing so. He guessed he wasn’t used to it, yet.

“Sum the digits in that number.”

“32.”

“The square root of which is…?”

“5.656854-”

“And the square root of that?” Corvus interrupted.

“2.378414-”

“Back to the first number, factor it.”

“37 and 407,489.”

“The square root of the second number? And you can round to the ten thousandths.”

“638.3486,” Huey rattled off, and stopped for the first time to hear the scientists muttering to one another, with some simply looking on with either giddy smiles or troubled bemusement. He waited for another one of Corvus’s commands, but it never came. Only a short silence.

“Well?” Cousin Corvus asked his awestruck colleagues.

They were all quiet, until the goose to whom Corvus was speaking earlier piped up, saying,

“He’s amazing! He’s a genius!”

“Just like my father,” Corvus said proudly, but with a tenderness he had only just expressed. He squeezed Huey’s shoulders harder than before.

“Well,” a decrepit vulture began, seemingly the oldest member of the group. “Ludwig could remember every book he’d ever read. There are plenty of mental calculators -- not to offend you, little Hubert,” the vulture smiled warmly at the boy like a grandfather. It took Huey a moment, but he realized to smile back before the vulture finished. “But I’ve never so much as heard of anyone besides your father who could do the, uh, the first thing.”

“Huey…” Corvus started, then paused for a while. “What is on… page two-hundred-seventy-seven of _The Brothers Karamazov?”_

Huey closed his eyes. He hoped it would be over after this. Thinking a few of Beakley’s literature assignments back, he pictured the book, then he pictured it opening to page two-hundred-seventy-seven. As his mind got ahold of it, the scene replayed in his mind as he spoke,

“The middle of Ivan’s monologue to Alyosha, he’s saying, ‘when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.” When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, “Thou art just, O Lord!” then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept-’”

Huey’s recitation was interrupted, and he himself pulled away from his recollection, by the gasps of the assorted scientists, who didn’t look so high and mighty, anymore, when he opened his eyes.

They were speechless, only dewy eyes and curling lips to express their admiration as they slowly approached him, like one might creep up to a dove before capturing it. Corvus backed away as the old men all gathered around and leaned down, to look closely at Huey, to pat his arms and back, and run their fingers along his jacket like a holy garment.

What sort of psychological hold did Uncle Ludwig have on these men?

“We’re going to get him a PhD before he’s fifteen,” Corvus announced, and it would have sounded like a joke if anyone laughed. To Huey, it would have, anyway.

They continued to adore him.

Huey found himself wondering, for the first time since the drive over, what Violet and the other Junior Woodchucks were up to.

“Is that Dolce and Gabbana?” one of the doctors asked, his attention having become more focused on the suit than the duckling wearing it.

“Um, Uncle Scrooge bought it for me,” Huey answered.

“Jesus!” the fellow exclaimed.

A figure standing in the entrance cleared his throat, and all turned to see a young Reform Rabbi.

“We’re about to begin.”

**Author's Note:**

> I promise there are people that smart. John von Neumann was one.


End file.
